Puccini's Ghosts Book

CWA Silver Dagger Award winner Morag Joss peers into the soul of a wounded family in this haunting, harrowing masterpiece of psychological suspense. With equal parts subtlety and menace, Joss takes us on a dizzying journey toward a collision between fantasy and reality—and an astounding moment of revelation that shatters illusions, hopes, and lives forever.

The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as the third player in her parents’ dramatically embittered marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George shows up from London and her family decides to squander a windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic production of the Puccini opera Turandot.

Lila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But Lila does know passion. Because it’s coursing through her veins—and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact the most chilling punishments of all.

Masterfully paced and spellbinding till its final, haunting scene, Puccini’s Ghosts is a piercing look into the fierce darkness that lurks behind seemingly ordinary lives.

The Washington Post - Maureen Corrigan

Morag Joss has written a world-class creeper in Puccini's Ghosts. Unrequited love, flattened artistic ambition, the passionate naiveté of adolescence -- these elements intertwine in Joss's novel, exerting a stranglehold on the main characters. This is not a novel for young readers; indeed, anyone under 30 should be prohibited from buying it and directed, instead, to the more upbeat sections of the bookstore (home improvement, New Age spirituality, the coffee bar). For the message of Joss's memory tale is that sometimes the stupid mistakes you make when you're very young do wreck things, forever. Sometimes there is no second chance, no scurrying back to trod the path not taken.